Saturday, 24 January 2026

Awful Green (and Purple) Things from Outer Space!


 Craig has been having fun with the venerable game, The Awful Green Things from Outer Space!  This game was originally a free insert in the long-defunct Dragon Magazine in 1979.  The game was created by legendary gamer Tom Wham and is currently available from Steve Jackson Games.

Craig has 3-D printed game components, and is currently working on expanding the game to be a four-player game with two crew factions and two different strains of 'things'.  

But I'm getting ahead of myself!  For those not familiar with this game, a bit of background is going to be helpful.  The crew of the spaceship Zuntar has been exploring the galaxy, and picked up some strange rocks from an otherwise nondescript planet.  This rock inexplicably grew into a strange creature that started to eat crewmembers.  Here is the gameboard, which is the floorplan of the Znutar.  


And here are the 3D printed components.


As an example of the crew, these are the Snudlian crewmembers.  The underside of each crewmember has information on that piece including movement rate, attack dice and constitution.


Other crewmembers include the Redundans, Smabalites, Snudalians and the ship's mascot.



Craig has added Awful Purple Things from Outer Space as a second faction to compete with the Awful Green Things.  Both types of Awful Things come in multiple 'stages':  eggs, young, adults and fragments.  Fragments are a potential side effect of being attacked by the crew.  If a weapon doesn't kill an AT, it might break it into multiple fragments which can each grow into a new AT!


The crew are not prepared to battle the ATs.  They must experiment, typically by trial and error, to find out which tools will be useful in stopping the ATs.  Craig has printed out chits with weapon effects - each time a tool is used, a chit is randomly chosen.  The effects range from no effect at all, to small to large amounts of damage, to potentially exploding the ATs into fragments or even making them grow larger!  These trays hold the chits as they are drawn.


Here's an early shot from the game.  APTs (awful purple things) are starting to spread through the ship, laying eggs and searching for crewmembers to lunch on.  Crewmembers in turn prepare to respond to the invasion.


The Znutar has a few small craft, seen here including the saucer, cockboat and scoutship.


The white boxes are spacesuits, which make the crew harder to kill.


Over time, the crew end up concentrated in a few small areas as the ATs run rampant through the rest of the ship.


Finally, the ATs overwhelm the crew.  Surprisingly, the ship's generally useless mascot survived by hiding out in the computer room.


The game is great fun as long as you don't take it too seriously.  Last night's game was a playtest, and Craig is planning adjustments before presenting it at Trumpeter Salute in April. 

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